That would be a tragedy. There is no Chicago without the L. It’s part of the fabric of our civic identity. Here, you don’t say “downtown.” You say “the Loop,” because the buildings that form our skyline couldn’t have grown so tall without the circle of elevated railways beneath them. A great city doesn’t just deserve a great transit system — it needs one. But getting the L back to being a source of pride will mean tapping into the same ingenuity that made it a triumph of civic engineering in the first place.
The L is what makes visits to Chicago feel so nice for us— we don’t have to worry about how we’ll get somewhere. We just have to allow for enough time for us to get there. But now, in the criminal trump regime, the L stands to become an artifact of the past given politician’s lack of gonads to get it fixed and give it a future for everyone.
Minneapolis looks at Chicago in envy. Minneapolis took the L and strong boy mayor Frey guy means to have it keep taking the L.
When it happened a third time, I switched into full “research and destroy the problem” mode. One of my Ars colleagues commiserated with me, writing, “This kind of powerful-annoying stuff is just so common. I swear at least once every few months, some shortcut or whatever just stops working, and sometimes, after a week or so, it starts working again. No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives].”
from Kurt’s diary: “I crossed the border over to Tijuana for the day to eat a cesar salad and buy leche Jersey for Francis Bean and Lourdes chips for Courtney. On my way back I stopped by at FONAPAS to see an exhibition and walked over to Plaza Río to Dorian’s to buy a shirt” - April 1st, 1993
i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter
the result is this garbage
I’m driving myself up the wall because I swear I can hear the vocal line but I don’t know how that could be if it was truly converted to MIDI. Unless you can replicate speech sounds entirely with modulated MIDI notes, in which case I’m actually impressed with this tire fire of an MP3.
the holiday season is almost upon us and I’d like to bring back this absolute fucking monstrosity of an audio file
The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup.
We gave up on local retailers for 99% of everything we own. If we need to buy something in-person, it’s usually at the nearest co-op, or at Costco. We don’t step into any corporate retailers unless there is a dire need.
Gifford v. Sheil is not the first time an influencer has accused another of copying them — copyright itself is frequently weaponized in inter-creator conflicts through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime. Gifford’s suit, which takes the battle out of the realm of platform-level DMCA adjudication and into a federal district court, significantly raises the stakes. Perhaps the suit will serve as a serious warning shot to other influencers, but it mostly strikes me as a last-ditch effort by someone who has exhausted her other (few) options.
The article itself says regardless of who pushes a product on you, amazon still gets paid. This suit has the potential to change the entire ecosystem stateside for content creators… while corporations will stay mum so people forget about their role in the entire situation.
Eatertainment venues are more than destinations for date nights and office parties; far more than the rudimentary arcades and bowling alleys of eras past: Resting on three axes of pleasure (food, drink, and play), they offer a seamless, satisfying, and bonafide human “experience.” Sims and Smash Park operations director Kristin Kroeger, for example, emphasized to me that Smash Park’s true appeal lies not just in pickleball but in the brand’s combined activities, full bar, “scratch-made kitchen,” and premise of social interaction, all of which alchemize into a single “legendary experience.”
In short, they want you to suffer FOMO if you’re not there when your friends are. Minneapolis is having a bit of a boom in these venues, with the unspoken addition that landlords absolutely love them:
Long lease times.
Humongous venue sizes. Smash Park in Roseville is 30K square feet. Puttshack in Southdale Center is 25K square feet. Puttery in Minneapolis is 70K square feet
A lot of them require parking, helping support mandatory parking minimums. Landlords would love to bring them back after they were abolished.
A lot of these venues are also 18+ or 21+. Children are not allowed. Considering the current political environment, in a couple years there will be no children to speak of so it’ll be a moot problem… until these venues can’t hire young employees:
The labor force is expected to increase by 8.9 million, or 5.5 percent, from 2020 to 2030. The labor force of people ages 16 to 24 is projected to shrink by 7.5 percent from 2020 to 2030. Among people age 75 years and older, the labor force is expected to grow by 96.5 percent over the next decade.
All in all. they qualify as Big Business. We know US economic policy hates small businesses— although holding small business as the best of capitalism is a mistake.
Eatertainment wants to replicate the experience of you hanging out with your friends at someone’s place, drinking and eating and playing games. But you get to pay for it.
